Tenured Radicalhttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical
The 3.0 editionFri, 13 Feb 2015 21:28:08 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1When You Have A Hammer: Social Media Civil Wrongshttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/02/when-you-have-a-hammer-social-media-civil-wrongs/
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/02/when-you-have-a-hammer-social-media-civil-wrongs/#commentsFri, 13 Feb 2015 21:14:59 +0000Claire Potterhttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/?p=9669 Read More ]]>My attention is drawn today to an ongoing story about a right-wing faculty blogger at Marquette University who is facing unemployment for trashing a graduate instructor on his blog. Bloggers everywhere may wish to take note — and they may also want to make sure their social media style doesn’t violate university policies.

The university says [McAdams] behavior was unprofessional and that he misled the public about what happened in a dispute between the graduate instructor and an undergraduate student. The professor, John McAdams, says he is being punished for his free speech. He also maintains that Marquette shouldn’t be attacking him, given that he is defending an undergraduate’s views against gay marriage that are consistent with Roman Catholic teachings. (Marquette is a Jesuit university.)

The dispute over McAdams attracted national attention even before Marquette moved to fire him, with some academics backing the graduate student and others McAdams.

In November [2014], McAdams, an associate professor of political science, wrote a blog post accusing a teaching assistant in philosophy of shutting down a classroom conversation on gay marriage based on her own political beliefs. His account was based on a recording secretly made by a disgruntled student who wished that the instructor, Cheryl Abbate, had spent more time in class one day on the topic of gay marriage, which the student opposed. McAdams said Abbate, in not allowing a prolonged conversation about gay marriage, was “using a tactic typical among liberals,” in which opinions they disagree with “are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

Abbate said McAdams had distorted her actions — and that she wasn’t trying to shut down an argument she disagreed with, but simply had wanted to keep a focus on an in-class conversation about the philosopher John Rawls’s equal liberty principle. But conservative blogs spread McAdams’s take on the situation — and she found herself receiving a flood of hateful e-mail messages, some of them threatening.

Also, as it turns out, according to the letter, the student (who taped the conversation with Abbate without her knowledge, and turned it over to McAdams) now says he dropped the class because he was failing — not because he felt politically intimidated. Indeed, it appears that he had already accumulated three grades of F, which is more or less unrecoverable by November. Other key facts are in dispute: was Abbate a faculty colleague, or student? On January 30, 2015, MacAdams received this letter from his dean notifying him that Marquette was beginning termination procedures.

Is this more weird fallout, regardless of the differences in circumstances, from the Steven Salaita case? It’s hard to think that it isn’t linked in some way, and that faculty on social media are coming under increasing scrutiny. On the other hand in 2005, Marquette suspended a dental student for derogatory blogging too. You can read the university’s social media policy here, and without having access to the dossier and investigation, it seems that McAdams may very well be in violation of it. But the central case against McAdams is on page two, about two thirds of the way down: what it says is that you are not allowed to punish people on social media by lying about them.

Academia may be one of the few places where people do not automatically lose their jobs when scrutiny exposes falsehoods, animus or bias posing as humor. In a more recent story, Jon Ronson explains how “One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life” (New York Times Magazine, February 12 2015.) And that’s not all! There is one instance in which the tweeter and the tweet-ee will both be sorry forever for being such fuckwits.

However, we may be moving in that direction. Most of us don’t go to the trouble of writing a whole blog post about a graduate assistant to throw our careers into a death spin, but most of us in academia *do* put up thoughtless, reactive things about colleagues, students and political events on Twitter and Facebook. Some of us do it all the time. Might be time to check that at the door, until we figure out this new American thing of wanting to smash people for saying and thinking the wrong thing? It might also be time to check what we tweet, re-tweet, Facebook and share to make sure it is true. The law of Internet truthiness means that social media utterances tend to acquire facticity as they trend, and they also become more “about” one thing — racism, free speech, misogyny, the One True God — as they multiply across platforms. In addition, when are the stakes high enough that we are willing to take a risk? And when could we just shut it and everything would be fine?

Back to blogging, our chief concern here @Tenured Radical. There are so many things at stake in the Marquette case. John MacAdams is screaming academic freedom, even as he deliberately altered the trajectory of a young woman’s career with untrue charges and exposed her to the massive stress of anonymous hate speech. Aside from the fact that most universities have rules about how you are supposed to treat subordinates (or even your peers), the question is: does academic freedom actually protect your right to publish things that are not true, as opposed to protecting your views about events that are demonstrably true? In this case, had McAdams expressed what is a mainstream conservative view about classroom indoctrination by liberals without making an example of a graduate instructor; and attributing motives to her and to the undergraduate that are disputable, would his speech have been protected? Probably.

In my view, there are many questions in play. If we are going to claim academic freedom for our work in social media, do the facts in the case — as opposed to your opinions about the facts — have to be sound, particularly when you are impugning someone else’s professionalism? To answer this question, we have to ask a second: would academic freedom protect a scholarly book that was factually incorrect, or even plagiarized? There are a whole raft of cases that say no, it does not, and I think very few of us could make a cogent argument that says otherwise. Yet, is the transgression severe enough that McAdams should lose his job? Are there not other forms of discipline that might make the same impact – and if we support this in MacAdams case, does it not normalize an atmosphere of extreme punishment against people who make errors in judgment, or self-publish controversial things?

One afternoon while I was struggling to grade midterm exams in my office, the phone rang. “Rob Bucks” (I use a pseudonym not to protect the innocent, but to protect me from the wrath of a militantly litigious desperado) introduced himself in staccato sentences. He said he was a Hollywood producer and wanted to “make a major motion picture out of Mosquito Empires.” We historians often joke about the movie rights to our books, but Rob Bucks’s ambition struck me as among the most implausible things an adult had ever said to me, as it concerned a book I had recently published that deals with yellow fever and malaria in Caribbean history, and is chockablock with depressing stories of masses of nameless people suffering and dying young in doomed settlement schemes and military operations. So I asked Rob Bucks if he had read my book. He responded with practiced evasion: “I love history. I read history all the time.”

Mmm-hmmm. Puzzled as to why this book — good as it is (and I know that because I was on the committee that awarded the prize, so I read it twice) — would be of interest to a big budget movie producer, McNeill demurred. “I asked him if he was aware that there was nothing resembling romance in my book, and the only intimations of sex involved obscure species of mosquitoes,” the historian responded. “He was undeterred and replied, in his characteristically familiar way, as if we had been friends since grade school, `John, John, I can help you with that.’” Producer “Rob Bucks” suggested that McNeill write a treatment so that they could begin their collaboration.

Despite ascertaining that “Rob Bucks” was a real producer, although not one who had made a hit for some time, McNeill declined the offer. It turned out to be a good decision.

Two weeks after passing on this opportunity of a lifetime, I had dinner with another historian (“Professor Jones,” to protect the innocent), who had given a talk on my campus about his latest, much-admired book. I began to regale him with the story you have just read, but did not get far before he interrupted and said, “Wait, it’s not Rob Bucks, is it?” I soon learned from Professor Jones that my book and I were not alone in meriting a phone call from the movie producer. My friend had received the same pitch, not long before his book appeared, but unlike me, he had followed through, made a deal, and written up something for Rob Bucks. Then, when the book came out, Jones continued, Rob Bucks sued him for some version of infringement upon intellectual property.

What a racket! “When I look back on the affair,” McNeill writes, “I marvel at Rob Bucks’s business model. Only a desperate man out of good ideas (indeed, out of moderately bad ideas) would hatch a plan to recoup his fortunes by suing academic historians. In the annals of American entrepreneurship, this must rank among the least promising schemes ever concocted. For a movie producer, presumably accustomed to deals involving millions of dollars, this was passing strange. He could sue the entire membership of the AHA, win all his suits, and still walk away with only chump change.” (For more on the perfidious film industry, go to OutHistory.org for revelations that the Alan Turing biopic, The Imitation Game as also a history swindle.)

I’m thinking perhaps a claymation hit from Pixar, in which the colonization of the Americas is told from the perspective of a hardy clan of mosquitoes, at least one of which stows away on a ship by mistake – and returns to Europe!!!! – there meeting far more sophisticated and dastardly mosquitoes who are plotting to take down the Holy Roman Emperor. Voice overs by Nicki Minaj, Ellen DeGeneres, and LaVerne Cox.

A dear friend and collaborator has just entered a well-deserved retirement. When I wrote to congratulate her and express my senior envy, she replied: “Do the math, Radical. It’s closer than you think.” I hope so. Of course, she was always better at math than I.

I am, like many people, more ambivalent about retirement than that sounds. I love my work, but I love some aspects of it more than others; I find some activities more rewarding than others; and there are other things, that I used to love, that make me grumpy. I can never tell from year to year what those things will be. For example, here’s a big yuck for you: I think committee service has its appeals. Certainly as someone was hired as a mid-career prof by a large urban university, it had been one of the few ways to make relationships outside my immediate unit. It is also an entry to all the knowledge no one writes down in the faculty handbook (not that we have a faculty handbook: I am currently serving on a committee that is part of the process of creating one. As I understand it this has been going on for a Very. Long. Time.) But it is also the case that at a certain point, unless you are an academic megalomaniac, you reach an age where you realize that your impact on an institution, a field or a reading audience needs to occur in a finite time frame. There just aren’t so many decades left, and a lot of things no longer feel as urgent as they should, perhaps.

In a way, I think: “Retirement? I just got here! I’ve had a Ph.D. for less than 25 years!” I’m also co-director of a big exciting project that is just getting off the ground. But I have also always maintained that I don’t want to hang on longer than I am useful; or, conversely, longer than being formally employed is useful to me. Other people, of course, feel differently.

Really differently. Which was why, after I read former American Historical Association president Jan Goldstein’s “Retirement as a Stage in the Academic Life Cycle” (Perspectives, October 2014), I was surprised that no one was talking about it. It turns out that the expected flood of retirements has not been stoppered up by the economic situation. As Goldstein reports (footnotes are in the original),

a study sponsored by TIAA-CREF, carried out by the Chronicle of Higher Education and published in 2013, shows a very different picture. In its survey of faculty over the age of 60, the study found that a mere 15 percent were in fact eager to retire at “normal retirement age” (roughly 65 years old) but were prevented from doing so by adverse financial situations; moreover, only half of that group mentioned the after effects of 2008 as figuring into their calculations. At the other end of the spectrum, a full 90 percent of those surveyed expressed reluctance to retire at 65, and some 60 percent had made a firm choice to continue beyond that benchmark. The reasons for postponing retirement identified by this study were overwhelmingly positive: professors enjoy what they do. But darker emotions also routinely surfaced among those surveyed. Having a real passion for their work and a powerful identification with it, professors worry about the consequences of cutting themselves off voluntarily from a work environment so bound up with their sense of self.

It’s really a very powerful piece, and argues that retirement is a kind of weird and shameful thing for academics. Retirement is, Goldstein argues (citing Carolyn Bynum) an “unspeakable subject,” a “strangely taboo topic,” and “can be felt as a stigma by those who choose it.” How interesting is this? Hence, it is not surprising that financial incentives for retirement have met with quite “limited success,” and in some places have been withdrawn.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t care whether other people retire or not, unless they are losing energy or their marbles, but I certainly hope to do it while I still have a chance to live the last third of my life with grace and gusto. And I won’t be ashamed at all.

There are plenty of righteous political arguments against LGBT people organizing their lives around marriage and family formation. I say this as someone who was relieved to learn I was a lesbian, even though coming out was tough, because the last thing I wanted was to marry and parent children. I wanted work, and I wanted freedom, and being a person who was legally barred from both parenthood and marriage was a huge relief. I also took it too far, and made myself obnoxious to others. People who knew me when I was young may remember that I could be downright nasty towards the special insights, pleasures and benefits that many of my feminist mentors associated with mothering (whatever afterlife you are in, Sara Ruddick, I apologize.)

So for much of my life, I have more or less ignored the siren song of normalization: I couldn’t pass as normal anyway, so I never tried. That said, I have also tolerated massive amounts of economic, legal and social discrimination, despite my relatively high levels of privilege and education. I don’t take homophobia lightly, in other words, and discrimination is stubborn and persistent. Because I think like this, I have never believed that the campaign for gay marriage has been responsible for diverting financial resources that otherwise would have gone to poor or disenfranchised people, or somehow ended discrimination by other means. This is an assertion that is frequently made and entirely unproven, as is the assertion that marriage only conveys benefits to white, middle class and wealthy people: see Ann DuCille on the nineteenth century struggle for marriage rights among African-Americans. DuCille’s evidence argues that marriage has been viewed as an important marker of personhood and citizenship, and that middle class political rights do matter.

Perhaps I am also skeptical of the power of racial and economic privilege to protect because I lived through the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, when gay marriage wasn’t even on the table, and I saw how difficult it was for queer people to get anyone outside the community to attend to our legal, economic and social needs. I saw how quickly otherwise privileged people could become homeless, poor and uninsured; how middle and upper middle-class men who had chosen to go through life together could have their lives disintegrate as other family members asserted their “rights.” Poor and incarcerated people, who were mostly of color, suffered far worse neglect, but class and race did not protect people in the ways gay marriage critics on the left presume they do.

Historically, homophobia has functioned to position queerness, and queer familial relations, as the opposite of “normal,” and it still does. Queer theory was, in many ways, born out of the decision to point out the trouble with normal, to reject normality as desirable, and to zero in on rights conveyed through state-sanctioned familial relationships as a central social justice problem for everyone, gay or straight. This work, and scholarship that descends from it, still blows my mind. It was a massive intellectual breakthrough, and continues to have an impact far beyond the LGBT community. Yet, like all theory, it does not map precisely on how everyone can, or can choose, to live their real lives, under capitalism — only how we could live our lives more freely in the future we won’t live to see. This is where I think that queer theory has real limits as an organizing stance as well. It presumes that if the LGBT civil rights movement had eschewed the marriage struggle and worked on moving us towards a different political system, social justice for everyone would be within our reach.

So here’s my trouble with queer: when the vision is so totalizing that it rejects the politics of now for the politics of could-be, I wonder where that leaves most ordinary people? Why not work on eliminating discrimination and fighting for social justice, broadly conceived, at the same time? It is a weird kind of mercantilist thinking that presumes there are only X dollars in the queer litigation pie, and when they go to one issue there is nothing left for another. I think this is a vision problem that may be more broadly typical of the queer university than it is specific to the queer left, where there are numerous examples of community-based initiatives and organizing strategies that are supported by queer projects coming out of places like the ARCUS Foundation or the Gill Foundation. Many academics can see themselves, their social peers and the powerful people they critique with great clarity; similarly, we are insightful about the very poor, the homeless, and the socially marginal. With rare exception (see, for example, Karen Tongson on the queer ‘burbs), however, queer academics tend not to see, or be very interested in, the people in the middle who have relatively modest lives, who work hard to stay in their homes, to pay for health insurance, and to take care of their children, without any of the resources to which professional people, married or unmarried, have access.

Which is why I was delighted to see this story in today’s New York Timesabout two nurses, April DeBoer and Jane Rouse, Michigan litigants in the gay marriage case that will be heard by the Supreme Court this term. De Boer and Rouse, parents of three kids (two of whom are developmentally disabled), realized after a near-death automobile collision that they needed to provide for custody of their children. They discovered that all the money, and lawyering, in the world would not help them. Because marriage is a pre-requisite for cross-adoption in that state, ”Each parent legally had no claim to the children her partner had legally adopted,” and never would. In the event that one parent died, the family could be easily destroyed, with one or more children returned to foster care or sent to live with a blood relative who was a stranger.

DeBoer and Rouse went to attorney Dana Nessel

who advised them that she could draw up guardianship papers, but that they would be nearly worthless legally. She urged them instead to file a federal lawsuit challenging the adoption law in Michigan. When Ms. Nessel, a co-counsel for the family, went to gay rights groups asking for their support, they all declined, telling her that she would lose the case.

“None of the organizations were interested in doing challenges of this sort,” Ms. Nessel said. “But I thought their story was so compelling. And I thought the adoption code was appalling and needed to be rectified.”

Undeterred, they filed a lawsuit and went before a United States District Court judge, Bernard A. Friedman, a Reagan nominee who in 2001 had ruled that the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies were unconstitutional.

In Judge Friedman’s courtroom that day in 2012, he suggested that Ms. DeBoer and Ms. Rowse radically change course. Amend your claim to take on Michigan’s law banning same-sex marriage, he said, referring to the measure that voters approved in 2004.

“We felt the judge’s implication was clear — either amend the proceedings to challenge the marriage ban, or the entire case could be dismissed,” Ms. Nessel said, recalling her shock. “April and Jayne, as much as they wanted to get married and adopt their kids, never set out to challenge the marriage ban.”

Let me draw attention to the part of this story that dovetails neatly with the queer critique of marriage: LGBT organizations were not interested in changing the adoption laws in Michigan, probably because it would detract from the gay marriage campaign they have centered; and a Republican appointee urged Rouse and DeBoer down the marriage track as well. It is excellent evidence that the focus on marriage does push us all towards normalization by making other forms of family formation legally impossible, and therefore, unimaginable.

And yet, people get married for all kinds of good, bad, expedient and repellant reasons. DeBoer and Rouse seem like such good people, people who may not have the time or the money to spend the rest of their lives fighting for Swedish-style socialism like the rest of us. They also put the best face on LGBT community, far better than someone like me who spends most of her time in meetings or at home writing.

Rouse and DeBoer fit into a long history of choosing poster children to give a face to important civil rights cases. As we know, numerous individuals were rejected by the NAACP before activist Rosa Parks, a woman of impeccable public and private virtue, was chosen to challenge segregated public accommodations in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Yet no one has ever accused Parks, the NAACP or many other heroic litigants of having achieved civil rights for an elite few at the expense of ending poverty and social discrimination for the many. Like Parks, who as an educated middle-class woman dealt with the violence of legal segregation every day, DeBoer and Rouse are also real people, and their real life has the violence of legal homophobia built into every day. In addition, a couple who adopts special needs children is volunteering for a kind of parenting that, in my experience, academics often embrace when it is thrust upon them, but for which they do not volunteer, and which their friends often presume they should have avoided with batteries of prenatal and genetic tests. But DeBoer and Rouse did volunteer for it, it puts them in the spotlight whether they sue to be married or not, and nurses aren’t rich.

But what if they were? Shouldn’t they still have the right to protect their family’s life the way everybody else does? And does that right not reverberate to other forms of social justice: the right to be safe in our homes, protect ourselves and our families against state violence, and from economic inequality?

Discuss.

]]>http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/9617/feed/0How Tenured Radical Thinks The GOP Will Respond To Obama’s Plan For Free Community Collegehttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/how-tenured-radical-thinks-the-gop-will-respond-to-obamas-plan-for-free-community-college/
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/how-tenured-radical-thinks-the-gop-will-respond-to-obamas-plan-for-free-community-college/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 17:00:15 +0000Claire Potterhttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/?p=9611
]]>http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/how-tenured-radical-thinks-the-gop-will-respond-to-obamas-plan-for-free-community-college/feed/0The Mysteries of Facebook: Part IIhttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/the-mysteries-of-facebook-part-ii/
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/the-mysteries-of-facebook-part-ii/#commentsSat, 17 Jan 2015 18:07:42 +0000Claire Potterhttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/?p=9599 Read More ]]>Last night I broke my only New Year’s Resolution: don’t argue, or provoke others to argument, on social media. What I am talking about is what I call “the cycle.” This is a mental feedback loop of incessant open-ended arguing, often with insults and others jumping in and repeating arguments already made.This is accompanied by obsessive checking of Facebook (or Twitter) to see what the latest insult to my personal integrity is. It’s one of several things about Facebook that make me feel bad, just bad. It is also a humungous time waster.

The worst thing is that, when it happens, it is usually entirely my own fault.

Here’s what happens: scrolling through my feed, someone I do not know posts a comment or status update that has elements that are bound to annoy me. These might include: a statement that poses as radical, but actually just repeats a well-known political critique; an ideological position that may or may not have any foundation in fact; a statement that is inherently reproving, but in no way intended to reprove me, except via my connection with the group being reproved; a statement that is politically-holier-than-thou (in my view) and oversimplifies the issue under discussion.

How does my experience with the cycle fit into existing research about the costs and benefits of social media? No one has studied academics yet, but the scholas hip that is out there offers some ideas. According to the Pew Research Internet Project’s new report, “Social Media and the Cost of Caring,” Facebook, Twitter and other apps that connect us are not inherently stressful, and when all other factors are constant, “women who use Twitter, email and cellphone picture sharing report lower levels of stress.” In other words, part of a circle of care, and being connected to friends in trouble, can actually make you feel better. However, the report summary also notes that ”there is a subgroup of social media users who are more aware of stressful events in their friends’ lives and this subgroup of social media users does feel more stress.” This would complement a study done at Stony Brook University which suggests that these circles of care can also become bad emotional places where we simply get stuck. Some teenage girls in the study became more anxious and depressed through “co-rumination” about intimate problems over social media, when distraction from troubling thoughts might have allowed them to move on to more positive feelings about themselves and others. Still other studies suggest that young adults who were frequent Facebook browsers don’t respond to happy posts by becoming happy, but become depressed instead because they feel that their own lives and achievements don’t measure up.

One of my takeaways is this: the Internet is not a toaster, as if it was obvious how to use it, short of absent-mindedly prying loose a bagel with a metal fork while it is still plugged in. But people treat it like one. Social media apps are primarily broadcast media for our brains and personalities, and there are many things that can go wrong without good self discipline. What kind of person you are, and how you are wired emotionally, might really affect how — or whether — you should think about using Facebook.

Using myself as a test case, here are a few aspects of my personality that seem not to really affect me with casual friends and family, but can make the dynamics of the academic Facebook stressful for me. Please add your own in the comments section if you like.

I have a tendency to be reactive, and I can be unconsciously dismissive and judgmental. I work hard to control it, because it is a quality I do not like in myself or others, but it is true.I am also: a lefty who actually detests political correctness, enjoys dissenting views and likes to engage conservatives and garden variety liberals without being krapped on by the akademik Komintern; I am a political historian who understands most contemporary social justice issues as complex and resistant to rhetorical and symbolic politics; and it is difficult for me not to feel berated and angry when people respond to me on Facebook as if I were simply a Bad Stupid Person and there were not several thousand people listening.

I argue for a living, and my brain puts all academics in the category of people to be argued with. Particularly ones I don’t know. Although I am judgmental — have I mentioned this? — there are whole categories of people who I exempt, but I tend not to exempt people with whom I have no social tie other than Facebook or Twitter. I am likely to be protective of other relationships, however: students; colleagues; real friends, academic and non-academic; family members; and old school chums fall into this category.

I have very strong views about what is, and is not, appropriate professional behavior for academics. In addition to this, I am judgmental (perhaps you are already aware of this) about unprofessional behavior that violates the Golden Rule. People who trash colleagues, staff and students on Facebook are, in my view, behaving badly and — in the case of contingent and untenured faculty — are being self-destructive. Furthermore, the “don’t punch down” rule has a corollary — don’t punch up either, or if you must, make sure there is something really at stake other than general resentment. A rowing coach once said to a group of us returning to the dock in a sloppy, half-assed way: “How you row at the end of practice is how you row.” Well, think about this: what if the kind of ill-tempered colleague or professor you are on Facebook is the kind of colleague or professor you really are?

I don’t want to be exposed to your temper tantrums about every little thing. OK: be funny about your problems, or ask for reassurance that life will get better after a disastrous dental exam or your kid’s third strep throat of the year. But getting angry about routine office and administrative mishaps? Please. In normal relationships, we don’t barf our rage and status anxiety all over people who are not our closest friends, and even then we tend to wait for something really important, like cancer or getting turned down for tenure. What counts as not really important enough to dump on strangers? Try a student coming late to class or asking for an extension/better grade/extra credit; a recalcitrant librarian; a department meeting that rambles on for no particular reason; an IT specialist who doesn’t show up; or neighbors having a party. If you need community support to deal with these things, consider therapy or a different line of work. Better yet, if you think a work-related problem is actually important, try getting help from your department chair, or one of the student support staff that are dedicated to enforcing, and helping faculty to enforce, university policies. Don’t speak to Facebook when you could speak to someone who could actually make the problem manageable.

I told you, I’m really judgmental. I realize that it is this that creates Facebook stress, not behavior on the part of others that I personally find objectionable. Even taking this into account, what I find is that bad social media behavior causes me to think that people I don’t know very well — and worse, people that I do — are really not very nice people. Yet this clashes with my view that most people are actually decent when you take the time to know them, and that unprofessional and mean-spirited behavior can be corrected easily when perpetrators understand how they are being perceived. This then triggers the Ms. Mentor in me, particularly when people:

Put stuff on Facebook that is potential career suicide. I find this stressful for many reasons, one being that I think it is mean to trash people, and particularly students, behind their backs in the guise of asking for “advice” and“personal support.”Admit it: you know you are being a jerk and you just want your friends to reassure you that you aren’t.In my (admittedly) highly judgmental view, people who think their Facebooks are a controlled space are detached from reality, and may need to address a potentially fatal tendency to compartmentalize. They may also know too little about social media to be on it. I have now been privy to two incidents in which screen shots of a Facebook page have been circulated to people outside the intended, private audience of — wait for it — several thousand people. Outrage about breaches of “privacy” ensued. (Here’s some Cold War CIA trade craft for you: if you tell one other person, it ain’t a secret.) Yet in at least one of these cases, even as the crisis of a circulated screenshot was unfolding, this did not disturb the collective view that the page was actually still private, had always been private, and should be a “safe space to vent.” I am intrigued by forms of magical thinking like this, but then my professorial, judgmental self kicks in. I either start arguing with people about how stoopid they are being, or the effort not to do so is overwhelmingly stressful.

So what have I done about this in my own life? To preserve what I value about Facebook and protect myself against what is stressful, I do whatever I might otherwise do to minimize negative interactions with people in real life. Try not to argue with or provoke them; end negative interactions before they escalate by acknowledging the other person, apologizing when necessary, and leaving the thread; blocking people who treat me disrespectfully, and reducing nattering nabobs of negativism to acquaintance status.

During the orientation for a meditation class I signed up to take this winter, the instructor notified us that we would need to make between 40 and 60 minutes a day available for our practice. “You need to figure out where you are going to find that time,” he said, calmly but firmly.

The first thought that popped into my head was: Facebook. Duh.

I spend a lot less time on Facebook now than I have in the past. Sometime last year I removed the Facebook app from my iPhone (by chance, I learned yesterday while listening to NPR that this might have already boosted my creativity by allowing me to be bored while waiting in line at Murray’s Bagels.) I consciously turn Facebook off when I am writing, so that my concentration is not interrupted by unnecessary multitasking. I decided that my New Year’s resolution was to not argue, or consciously provoke others to argument, on social media, which also saves time. I have gently moved to block, or demote to acquaintance status, people whose posts and comments I find offensive, relentlessly silly or worrisome. Even with these changes, I probably spend five to ten minutes checking Facebook at least three, if not five, times a day.

Could I usefully reduce that to once? Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

You might ask: why not eliminate Facebook completely? Good question.

Many people worry about privacy, but I don’t. My privacy is so thoroughly compromised, and the power of the American state so total, that I think the best I can do at this point is try to keep my nose clean, not buy fertilizer in the same place I purchase other chemicals, and hope that a federal prosecutor never notices I am alive and tries to indict me as a co-conspirator of someone I have never met.

I am far more sympathetic with another reaction people have to social media: that they don’t want to be “alone together,” as Sherry Turkle puts it. Many people come to believe they would rather be “alone alone” or “together together.” Some of these people have never signed up for Facebook in the first place, while others try to leave. People who would argue vigorously that gender, race and other defining aspects of our lives are socially constructed will unexpectedly invoke their aspiration to “real” or “authentic” relationships. Would these same people also look for sex and love over the Internet? My guess is yes, because nearly everyone in search of intimacy does nowadays.

I have seen a number of my Facebook “friends” make declarations of independence, cutting themselves off cold turkey, and suspending their accounts (it is actually quite difficult to delete a Facebook account completely.) Their friends wish them adieu as if they have boarded an ocean liner.

Those who leave offer their Facebook connections a chance to prove that they are “real friends” by suggesting that real friends are invited to ask for an “authentic encounter” like a telephone call. This is an interesting tidbit of contemporary cultural history: I am old enough to have a mother who told me years ago that she would prefer a thoughtful letter to a phone call, which took little time or effort.

Guess what? All these people have returned to Facebook, because the truth is that social media does offer benefits tthat real life does not.

So without further ado, this is what I would miss if I left Facebook:

The opportunity to meet, and have exchanges, on and off line, with people I would not know without Facebook. These are sometimes friends of friends who have ended up in the same thread; and sometimes people I was aware of and admired with whom I have then developed IRL relationships. For example, legal historian Annette Gordon Reed (who I admire very much) is my “friend”: I saw her coming at me at the AHA last week and introduced myself, something I otherwise would not have done.

In a community of academics, people share all sorts of interesting things. OK, they share stupid things too, but so what? The interesting stuff far outweighs the dreck in my feed. I read three daily, three weekly and five quarterly publications, listen to NPR at the gym and watch the PBS NewsHour at night, but I still wouldn’t know half the things I know if my friends did not post the articles that grabbed their attention to Facebook. Then, as a bonus, I get to discuss the article with them too.

Keeping up with real friends. Not surprisingly, real friends are often Facebook friends too. I have real friends all over the country (hellz, all over New York: do you know how many times I got to the Upper West Side last year? Maybe five?) who I could not see regularly if I wanted to. Facebook makes it particularly easy to keep up with the details that are the scaffolding of a friendship: pictures of kids, Dad’s stroke, book contracts, and particularly difficult home renovations. When my friends and I do see each other or talk on the telephone, I am more caught up with their lives than I would be, and the conversations can go deeper.

Circulating my blog posts, and knowing when my friends have blogged something. Sure, there are other ways to do this (bloggers tweet their posts, there are aggregators and RSS feeds, and one can subscribe) but Facebook is easy, I don’t need more emails coming in, and I don’t want to have another thing to look at every day. Not infrequently, I learn about a new blog or one I simply didn’t know about.

The next post will address what I don’t like about Facebook, but readers, what do you like about it? If you are on it, why do you stay?

]]>http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/the-mysteries-of-facebook-part-i/feed/0The Rules Were Not Suspended: What Happened at the AHA Business Meetinghttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/the-rules-were-not-suspended-what-happened-at-the-aha-business-meeting/
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2015/01/the-rules-were-not-suspended-what-happened-at-the-aha-business-meeting/#commentsMon, 05 Jan 2015 17:47:05 +0000Claire Potterhttp://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/?p=9531 Read More ]]>Yesterday afternoon the members of the American Historical Association (AHA) present at the business meeting were asked to take up several resolutions proposed by Historians Against the War (HAW). These resolutions proposed that the AHA condemn the state of Israel for alleged violations of academic freedom against both US and Palestinian scholars; and for attacks on research centers in Gaza last summer. You can read the resolutions here; you can read accounts of the meeting at History News Network, in my Twitter feed (I was sitting right behind Rick Shenkman, so I guess we were the press section) and in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The business meeting had been preceded by a session organized by the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization (MARHO). It too was organized late and was not on the program, although it was well publicized in the weeks leading up to the annual meeting. I could not have attended it had I wanted to, nor could numerous other people, since we were scheduled to be in our own sessions at that very moment.

Despite what you may have heard, however, AHA members present at the meeting did not vote down the resolutions. The resolutions were never discussed, since the necessary first motion was to suspend the rules to allow the resolutions on the agenda in the first place. They had not been received until mid-December, six weeks after the deadline, and Council (which could have put them on the agenda) had declined to act. The motion to suspend the rules, made by past AHA president Barbara Weinstein, failed by a 3-1 margin.

The Coalition of No was a heterogeneous one, and I voted with it: I cannot speak for others, but I will describe my own thinking below. I can say that my reasons did not include concern that Israel was being unfairly targeted; nor was I concerned about divisiveness within the organization, something people have reason to expect following vicious fights at the 2013 American Studies Association (ASA) and another that will be renewed at the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Vancouver as I write this. I do deplore divisiveness, but my experience is that the pro-Israel folks deplore it at the same time as they are perfectly willing to fuel it; and the anti-Israel folks fuel it by unrestrained attacks while insisting that divisiveness is being forced upon them by conservatives and their fellow travelers.

I’ve also been the object of such divisiveness, and I am here to tell you that life goes on: it is not necessarily a reason not to act. As readers know, a little over a year ago I ended up in a series of nasty online confrontations with the ASA faction pushing the BDS resolution when I questioned whether the “boycott” part of Boycott, Divest and Sanction violated academic freedom. These attacks extended themselves to Facebook and Twitter, as well as to vile messages sent to my personal email accounts. Subsequently, when I supported the Council’s decision to send the resolution to the membership for a vote, I received similarly hateful messages from supporters of Israel, except that this time I was called a Nazi instead of a Zionist, and sent a lot of Holocaust porn over email and Twitter.

In an interesting twist, and I do feel twisted by it, the resolutions that were presented to the AHA by HAW took an academic freedom perspective, with Israel as the culprit.

People keep asking me what I think of the resolutions themselves, and honestly? I don’t know, except that my own inquiries support some of the facts they assert. But that was part of the problem. Many of us on the academic left find our heads spinning as esteemed colleagues tell us that the situation they are describing in the Occupied Territories, and the urgency of AHA action in relation to them, is so obvious and incontrovertible that no documentation need be presented. Perhaps differently from other humanities scholars, many historians find this so profoundly opposed to the ethic of our practice, they dig in their heels right there, and I happen to be one of those people. You can’t be a student of the American past and not know that people repeat falsehoods all the time (white supremacy is a good example of this); and assert things they are sure of without knowing the facts (show me a race riot or lynching, and I’ll show you a rumor or falsehood.) Deliberately lying — which, I would like to say emphatically, I do not believe my colleagues in HAW have done — is also not uncommon in politics.

The question of documentation is not a trivial one, and documentation could have been provided. There is also the question of people voting to support things they know little about but that have unintended, entirely predictable consequences. Had the resolution passed, all kinds of expensive, legal hell would have broken over the heads of our AHA officers and the paid staff in Washington. I heard a rumor (a rumor! this may or may not be true!) last year that the executive director of ASA, John Stephens, worked from home for a prolonged period after that vote because he was receiving serious and violent threats.

I consider myself well informed enough at this point to be deeply concerned about the Occupation. At the same time, I see no benefit to anyone that would result from the AHA shaking its finger, with unaccustomed severity, at Bibi and his coalition in the Knesset. One outcome of the BDS nastiness (other than several people with whom I no longer have a speaking relationship) is that I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the international crisis that these resolutions address; as well as talking to activist scholars who are involved, either through BDS or through community partnerships, in the Occupied Territories.

As a result, I am far better informed about Israel’s policies and violence in the Occupied Territories and towards Palestinians within Israel’s borders than I was twelve months ago, and morereluctant to support organizing that begins and ends in academia. I have acquired a new appreciation and respect for why people who support BDS strategies do so, and my own views reflect an increasing conviction that US support for Israel is a critical element of regional violence. One might imagine that this is a “good outcome” of all the opprobrium dumped on me, but shouldn’t a scholarly organization, or a movement, be able to achieve this without hectoring people and trashing them in social media?

A consistent theme between the ASA resolutions and the resolutions that HAW hoped to put on the agenda at AHA is the claim that the process chosen was fully transparent to the entire membership when in fact it was not. The information disseminated to AHA members came late, and the HAW process leading to the resolutions, while not explicitly secret, was confined to the steering committee who acted independently and notified the rest of us that they had submitted resolutions on December 17. I was not the only member of HAW in the room who was never consulted about the content, or desirability, of these resolutions.

An earlier resolution, which was similar to that passed at the ASA but even more convoluted, was submitted on time. It was circulated to at least some HAW members, including yours truly, but did not meet the criteria for inclusion in an AHA business meeting. Weeks ago, when I asked a colleague who is one of the more active members of HAW how a BDS organizer had obtained the HAW mailing list, my friend did not know. I believe her that she did not know, but that information should have been available for any HAW member who asked, and any subsequent action should have included consultation with the entire HAW list.

I realize that a great many of my friends who feel strongly about the crisis in Palestine are frustrated by the willingness of many colleagues on the left to vote with our moderate and conservative colleagues at moments like this. But moderates and conservatives are not always wrong about everything. Here are some things to think about as we move forward as politically engaged scholars:

First, join the organization. The November resolution was turned back partly because a third of the people who had signed off on it were not AHA members. I know of at least four resolution proponents who joined between December 17 and the business meeting, seemingly unaware that in order to vote as a member you needed to be one.

Follow the rules, in letter and spirit. Is this really so hard? AHA executive director Jim Grossman was committed at the outset to running an open process; he and President Jan Goldstein worked with organizers, pro and con, at every stage. Deadlines aren’t just window dressing intended to repress the people: they are part of a legible governance process in a membership organization. The first resolution fell outside the guidelines of what can be accepted as an agenda item; the second set of resolutions did follow AHA guidelines, but were submitted a few days before Christmas when grading, travel and personal obligations tend to interrupt our concern for how the AHA will broker the crisis in the Middle East. Since these resolutions followed the ASA nastiness by well over a year, it is hard to understand why resolutions framed within the guidelines could not have been presented in a timely manner. This is what makes many of us, regardless of our politics, feel like what HAW was really saying was:

“Up against the wall, m***erf***er!” In other words, the suspicion remains that what is actually desired is a resolution passed by any means necessary; and a vote organized in such a way as to keep interested parties from voting because they had not planned to come to the meeting at all or stay long enough to attend a business meeting where, traditionally, very little occurs. HAW members claim that they wanted to solicit a vote of the full membership, knowing full well that less than a third of ASA members voted on the BDS resolution in 2014. If that is not the case, take the criticism seriously and stop surprising people with last minute resolutions of great consequence. There’s nothing less helpful for a colonized people in crisis than white people in New York arguing about the calendar and Roberts Rules of Order.

When a BDS resolution has already been circulated, claiming that the revision being presented is *not* a BDS resolution may be technically correct but not entirely honest. In the video attached to the HNN link above, Van Gosse, who seems to have been the lead organizer for HAW, characterizes the resolutions’ focus on academic freedom as strategic. I actually appreciate this, because I think it is true, and acknowledges that the toned down resolutions were a second choice. At the same time, “strategic” is really not the same thing as a principled, and expansive, defense of academic freedom which would exclude an academic boycott of Israel. It is also a misrepresentation of what happened: the BDS resolution did not meet the AHA criteria, was rejected, and was extensively rewritten into resolutions that could meet the germane test. In addition, during last year’s ASA wars, the argument was that academic freedom was not universal in practice, particularly in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and therefore sanctions against Israel that violated academic freedom were entirely acceptable. These two positions are not entirely inconsistent with each other (see, for example, historian Joan Scott’s “Changing My Mind About the Boycott,” 2013), but it requires a longer conversation for most people to understand why.

But — we only want to talk! Several people who argued in favor of the HAW motion to suspend made this argument: that those voting no were suppressing the debate about academic freedom that they claimed to want. (There isn’t anything more perversely hilarious than a room of tenured professors accusing each other of being anti-democratic.) Speaking only for myself, however, we had had a year since ASA and the blood bath at MLA to have this conversation, and demanding that it occur in the space of an hour was profoundly offensive. In addition, it wasn’t true that those who designed the resolution only wanted to talk. Passing the resolution to suspend would have led to the introduction of new resolutions, not just talk, then a discussion and a necessary vote on the resolutions. It would have taken a deft Parliamentary hand or a mass walkout followed by a quorum call (this idea was, in fact, circulating) to prevent a vote on the resolutions. It was also not clear why, if talking was a principle objective a) conversation had not been organized for more than one session and a business meeting; b) Alice Kessler-Harris was cat-called when she inquired as to whether a motion for discussion only could be made; and c) why the announcement that Vicki Ruiz was turning over half of her Presidential sessions in 2016 and charging the program committee to promote a stream, caused a resolution organizer in the audience to start screaming at Jan Goldstein.

A successful argument has not yet been made as to why non-binding sanctions levied by academic organizations are more effective than diligent research, writing, public speaking and scholarly engagement in the political sphere. I know a lot of BDS affiliated, and non-BDS affiliated scholars who are doing this, and could point to serious projects underway that promote civil rights, education and civil society. It is less clear to me what the effect of scholars passing resolutions has been, or in what tangible way they support civil society anywhere. Although the ASA resolution has been declared to be a grand success, its accomplishments and damage seem to be limited to the ASA itself. It has yet to be proven that ASA support for an academic boycott has achieved anything for anybody outside the United States, short of the few Palestinian scholars who were invited to attend the annual meeting in Los Angeles. If the ASA boycott has achieved tangible results, then this would have been important evidence to make available at the AHA business meeting. Although the 2007 AHA resolution against the Iraq war, which I think I did vote for, was repeatedly cited at yesterday’s business meeting, no one really made the case that it had any effect on US foreign policy.

Let me be clear: I do not doubt any assertions that the situation in Israel and the Occupied territories is dire, primarily for Palestinians, but also for civil society in Israel. Palestinian and Israeli scholars are surveilled by the Israeli state, with the consent of the US government, which seems to be documenting the political activities of everyone else. I have talked to Palestinian graduate students who have been presented with dossiers about themselves by Israeli state agents, dossiers with materials often gathered in the United States. I was horrified by the war in Gaza, and if I thought passing a resolution at the AHA would alleviate suffering I would work hard to do it.

However, I am less convinced that — well-meaning as it may be — the attempt to jam through anti-Israel resolutions at an academic meeting are anything but a sideshow to an international crisis that requires real interventions, not phony ones. There are times, places and circumstances under which we must suspend the rules: yesterday was not one of them.

Update 01.06.2015: Van Gosse of HAW has asked me to clarify that “the BDS resolution that went to AHA in November had nothing to do with HAW, or at least anyone active in any way with whom I am familiar;” that HAW did not provide the organizer of the November resolution with a mailing list of members;” and that HAW would never offer its mailing list to another person or group. In other words, there was no relationship between the November and December resolutions. I appreciate his contribution to making the post more accurate.

Tenured Radical was launched on October 18, 2006, in New Haven Connecticut. In a little more than seven years I have written 1,794 posts on topics as various as the humanities job market, national politics, sexual assault, books, writing, and the BDS movement. Although I began writing under a pseudonym, that only lasted for a few months, since I was quickly outed by my students. That turned out to be a good thing, however: not only has blogging brought me a great many opportunities in the old and new media worlds, it also became a place where I have been able to articulate my ideas and observations about higher education from the perspective of someone who has been in school, in some fashion, for over half a century now.

In the summer of 2010, I received a call from The Chronicle of Higher Education, asking me if I would like to move Tenured Radical. Very few of us who migrated the following July are still active, but I think our work changed this publication by making it aware that a younger academic public, faced with different challenges, found much of the CHE less than relevant. As a result, the CHE’s newest, non-firewalled section, Vitae, is bloggy rather than journalistic, opinionated rather than researched. It favors younger authors, most in a pre-tenure, or even pre-employment, stage. Many are current and former bloggers, and the articles tend to favor horizontal advice giving, confrontational language and heretical views about academic success. I would also argue that academic blogging probably launched the new genre of memoir called “quit lit,” in which academics announce that they are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore

My jump to this larger academic audience – which has since led to opportunities to be a guest in other venues – op-ed pages, mass circulation journals of ideas, radio and television — occurred through a weird combination of luck and pluck. Shortly after I commenced publishing under my real name in spring 2007, I wrote a post about a New York City shock jock’s racist commentary on the Rutgers University women’s championship basketball team, all African-American women and outstanding students. I noted in passing that a group of white male athletes at Duke had acquired a robust and proactive group of defenders despite a rather long history of violent behavior, culminating in rape and assault charges against a Black stripper they had hired. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.

I posted the piece at 4 p.m.: by 9:00 the next morning, when I walked into my office, I had over 100 comments (I was used to six or seven), many of which threatened me with sexual assault of various kinds; and an inbox full of equally nasty emails from people who were making it their business to get me fired. The message light on my telephone was blinking wildly: I had messages from the president of the university, the chair of the board of trustees, the provost, my dean, the university counsel, and my department chair, all of whom had also received emails and phone calls demanding my immediate termination. Perhaps what was most shocking to me was that the attack had been led by a fellow historian, also a blogger, my first introduction to what is today a commonplace social media experience for scholars and journalists: being viciously attacked by colleagues and graduate students you have never met.

The moral of the story is that just because a scholar wants a wider public, it does not follow that she always gets the public she wants. This is the “pluck” part: my comments section can have all the charm of a 19th century Lower East Side used beer joint, and it makes venues like MSNBC – where the interviewer peppers you with non-questions that begin “Don’t you really think….?” seem like models of sane conversation.

In the fast paced world of digital publishing, controversy sells if it doesn’t get you fired. This is probably the place to say that every one of those telephone messages, from the President of Wesleyan on down, reassured me that my blog – which hardly anyone I worked with really got, which is why it was so sweet – was covered by academic freedom.

This experience was lucky, because I never sought it out but suddenly my blog was noticed. Largely because I became part of a bigger story, and in the process learned to write really fast, I acquired an audience of many thousands a week, journalists began to call me for quotes, and opportunities in the mainstream media followed. There is a maxim in the blogosphere, coined by my friend Ann Little (otherwise known as Historiann), that links blogging to more conventional print productivity: “the more you write, the more you write” is how it goes. As it turns out, the corollary to that is: more you are read, the more you are read. It’s why lots of people whose reputations have been made in the journalism, fiction and non-fiction world take up blogging in the first place: it’s called a platform, and if you want to build an audience for your non-scholarly or scholarly work, or in anticipation of a major publication, you build one.

So what do I personally bring to the table as a public intellectual?

There are political and cultural narratives about higher education out there that are difficult to interrupt, whether it is the long-awaited death of the humanities; or the crisis of higher education financing; or the assumptions that are currently governing academic hiring. There are really very few people who are not presidents of major foundations who are bridging the constituencies affected by these debates. As a blogger, I can speak to these issues knowledgeably, and in ways different publics can understand. By speaking knowledgeably I don’t mean knowing everything – which I don’t. But I do mean being curious about the interrelated parts and the differences between and among conversations. I also mean listening and learning from people who join me in the comments section, even – perhaps especially — the commenters I do not like. A blog is an opportunity to start a conversation, if nothing else, and that conversation may finish somewhere else entirely – in a journal, on TV, on radio, on a panel or in a book.

I – and a number of other bloggers – bring feminism and critical race theory to the table in a journalistic world where some version of a) whether Beyoncé is a feminist; or b) whether the United States is post-racial seem to pretty much run the table. Although the social justice movement that began in Ferguson seems to have put paid to b) for the time being, few people know how to – or want to – write and talk about race and gender the way academics do. Many bloggers aspire to the stature of the publicly engaged scholarship of the late twentieth century, whether done by legal scholars like Derrick Bell, Catharine MacKinnon, Patricia Williams and Kimberlé Crenshaw; or intellectuals like Susan Brownmiller, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Cherríe Moraga. Absent a high profile attention to violence, and outside a very few publications, it is really very difficult to have a serious conversation about race or feminism nowadays, not to mention about a queer politics that won’t come to a dead stop with federally recognized marriage in all fifty states. It’s even more difficult, if you want to do that kind of writing, and are that kind of person – a woman, a person of color, queer – to become visible to publications that will commit to editing publishing your work.

Blogging creates that visibility. However, writing for a broader public brings challenges with it, challenges that include the fact that exposure to an undifferentiated audience brings unpredictable, and sometimes unpleasant, outcomes. People who read Tenured Radical know that I am a relentless advice giver, so I would like to end with some other barriers otherwise intelligent people, who happen to be academics, face when trying to reach the public they want and probably deserve:

Many academics think they write more accessibly than they do – or fail to understand that the rhetoric that is impressive to journals and tenure committees cannot engage a general audience of non-specialists. Don’t get me wrong – there are many kinds of good writing, and some of the best historians (for example, the ones sitting here with me) write intelligently and accessibly across genres. But most people don’t, and it is a learned skill. So is being on television, or in a documentary, or doing the pre-interview that will get you into a mass media production in the first place. No one teaches this in graduate school, and we probably should.

Writing for spur of the moment, short term deadlines is really fun, but you have to be willing to ditch other responsibilities to make it happen: for example, preparing for class, going to meetings, grading papers – the things we are paid to do. If an editor wants something by three p.m., or by Friday, that’s when they want it – and they want it to be clean, as well as under word count. Which leads me to my next point:

At least initially, your ability to move from self-publishing to commercial publishing will have a great deal to do with your tolerance for disappointment, for criticism, for rewrites and for being managed by people who don’t have Ph.D.’s – in fact they are probably interns. Many academics can’t help but see all criticism as very high stakes, so much so that several editors have told me that they often avoid working with us. Writing for an edited, general publication requires compromises. They include word-length, word- choice, being fact checked relentlessly, and perhaps even having a piece you have worked hard on rejected at the last minute because of a transportation accident.

Finally, do yourself a favor: practice your writing by blogging, even writing pitches to yourself before writing the post. But spend a lot of time reading the publications that you want to be published by, whether it’s The Huffington Post, which is pretty generous; or Raritan, Jacobin, n+1, or Dissent, where the barriers to a successful pitch are far more rigorous, and you may be rejected several times before being accepted. Try not to be paranoid about the grounds for rejection, and keep trying. The reason intelligent outlets for ideas still exist in a very competitive publishing world is that they are well-edited, they are different from each other, they gather an audience of a certain type, and they offer something special to it. You need to do that too.

And if a good piece is rejected? Well, you can probably publish it at Tenured Radical.

Following up on yesterday’s suggestions for out-of-towners, we asked Flirtatious Freddie, our tenured ace reporter, where queer historians might want to make new friends or dance with old ones. We got this reply:

“The hottest club that seems to make NYC feel like NYC is Viva but the cover is $30–Saturday night,” Freddie tells us. Tenured Radical researchers looked it up and saw that “shirtlessness is encouraged but not required.” Use your judgement, full professors! “There is no cover but plenty of dancing at Industry in Hells Kitchen, only a few blocks from the Hilton,” Freddie continues, “while Atlas Social Club, also quite near, is good early — between 11pm and 1:30am most weekend nights. In general, there are a dozen bars in Hells Kitchen — Boxers, Flaming Saddles, Therapy, Bar-tini—all are within walking distance of either the Hilton or the Sheraton. Late night, cruisey bars include East Village, The Cock ($10 cover); Eagle, leather bar (no cover, but don’t wear your interviewing clothes!)”

Lesbians, like Beebo Brinker did so many years ago, may still want to head on down to the Village: The Stonewall Inn is mixed space where men and women can have fun together, while at the same time telling folks at home they were out visiting a national landmark. The Cubbyhole is still there (depending on when you were last in New York, it may have moved); as is Henrietta Hudson, where old-school dykes will appreciate the pool table. Newer places include The Fat Black Pussycat. Staying with friends in Dyke Slope? There’s Ginger’s Bar.